I don't think SOMA really followed through too well either, as the dialogue never really advances the themes so much as it's just about a clueless person who is reacting to them. It's a more traditional game with enemies and an endless quest of fixing the station, and while it's probably the weakest aspect of SOMA it does lend a clutch that makes it more enjoyable than Firewatch once it's over.

The idea of the Ark and the general reason for all the disarray were very interesting. The virtual consciousness thing was good. The body swapping was okay. The robot killing was a little strange. I guess it was playing a little on a neat reveal about the robot or human conflict, I'm just not sure why it continued. The environment remained interesting. The quiet moments deep underwater don't have too much on Subnautica but are still done well. The enemies are so simple that they're forgettable if not annoying. The WAU is far less interesting than it might seem. The first few hours of the game aren't that great. Most of the narrative elements in the game are dedicated to these few topics, maybe a little milked. Firewatch had many simple and unique moments as well. I barely rate SOMA over Firewatch. I like both but they have some glaring issues.

The WAU was definitely a weak point in the narrative. The comet destruction/abandoned facility is a good part of the story, but the WAU felt like it was tacked on just to give the player some obstacles. I thought the enemies were fine, and after playing Penumbra I appreciated that there were five or six different types. The section on the sunken ship where there's the thing you can't look at was done well, and it was one of the few times I was actually scared (I assumed it couldn't open doors and got a nasty surprise ).

I agree the narrative topics were a little overdone, and if you're into the philosophy of consciousness/etc it's explored at least as well in other media. Not bad for a video game though.

Tried out Starpoint Gemini 2. Destroyed the first or second ship. Hit "Collect All" near its wreckage. Mentioned contraband items among the spoils. Received an alert almost immediately. Discovered contraband items onboard. Lost five reputation points for complying (versus ten for refusing to jettison). Chalked it up to doing something incorrectly. Barely finished tutorials for user interface, after all.

Continued playing. Learned how to remove cargo. Eliminated illegal goods twice without issue. Got caught on the fourth incident, however, by the ship that assisted in the kill. Failed to ditch it in time, despite immediately attempting to.

Looked it up later. Should have opened the Context Menu (Mouse3 by default). Apparently displays one button (among twelve changing buttons) to manually scavenge. Cannot recall ever getting penalized for auto-looting, except in Nethack. Appeared to be a minor sentence, at least. Probably gained more reputation from the kill quest completion.

Deva wrote:Tried out Starpoint Gemini 2. Destroyed the first or second ship. Hit "Collect All" near its wreckage. Mentioned contraband items among the spoils. Received an alert almost immediately. Discovered contraband items onboard. Lost five reputation points for complying (versus ten for refusing to jettison). Chalked it up to doing something incorrectly. Barely finished tutorials for user interface, after all.

Continued playing. Learned how to remove cargo. Eliminated illegal goods twice without issue. Got caught on the fourth incident, however, by the ship that assisted in the kill. Failed to ditch it in time, despite immediately attempting to.

Looked it up later. Should have opened the Context Menu (Mouse3 by default). Apparently displays one button (among twelve changing buttons) to manually scavenge. Cannot recall ever getting penalized for auto-looting, except in Nethack. Appeared to be a minor sentence, at least. Probably gained more reputation from the kill quest completion.

Wow. That's an interesting design decision (assuming it is a deliberate decision - it could be an unintended consequence of adding contraband after having designed the looting interface). Default would be for the interface to enact the most obvious player choice automatically, or with a minimum of clicks, and let players override it manually if they want to do something else, or possibly set it as an option in a menu somewhere if there are multiple sensible defaults.

This suggests either that they want to drain reputation by sneaking contraband into your hold for some reason, or that they want to encourage players to pick loot manually rather than using the shortcut they provided, or, most likely, they just didn't put enough thought into the "take-all" option - putting it in as a shortcut for player convenience but configuring it in such a way as to render actually using it inconvenient...

What would be the benefit of clicking the "take including illegal goods" in case there are two buttons? Are illegal goods a risky business or only a hindrance?After a bit of searching the web, illegal goods do seem to be big risky business, so a "take only the 'legal' stuff" button would make sense (given the extant "collect all" button).It's also a bit weird to have the "collect all" button separate (and more visible) from the looting button.

I would think it would be apparent but... if you're going to have an enemy ship drop more than one item AND some of those items may be illegal goods AND nearby ally or unrelated ships might scan you in less than 10 seconds, detect said illegal goods and penalize you for it....

You don't have a Take All button without a Ignore Illegal Goods option unless a big part of your game involves running from the authorities (Like Grand Theft Auto)

heuristically_alone wrote:I want to write a DnD campaign and play it by myself and DM it myself.

heuristically_alone wrote:I have been informed that this is called writing a book.

Quest: use 10 of {thing} scattered across nearby area of map. On map, shaded area indicates the part where they are. As each is collected, its part of the shading disappears and the shaded shape breaks down or is trimmed down into joined groups of circles and individual circles. Last one required, somewhere ... >> here << according to the arrow on the radar. No sign of it, and "select nearest object" is picking up all sorts of naturally-occuring materials, some of which I can't collect, so I can't clear them out of the way. I resort to looking at the map and trying to drive my position indicator into the centre of the circle of shading, spinning on the spot to see how far from the edge the tip of my position indicator is as I turn so I can make sure I'm central. No sign of the {thing}. Natural resource is nearest object. Go and collect it just to get it out of the way and ... oh, hey, what's that way over there? That looks like ... yep, that's a {thing}. In fact, that's one of three of {thing} in a long line, outside the shaded circle on the map.

I've discovered that XCOM:Enemy Unknown is one of several games I own that will silently fail to save if it can't write to /Docuements for any reason (like, for example, if Windows decided for no apparent reason that my user account just doesn't get to have write permissions for it's own documents folder...)But, befitting the infuriating nature of XCOM, it isn't content to merely fail silently, but actively conceals that it hasn't actually saved.If you open the Save of Load menus, there will be appropriate entries for manual and auto-saves made during the current session, labelled and timestamped correctly and with the appropriate thumbnail for the mission. Most amazingly, if you try to load one of these saves, the game will still insist that nothing is wrong and demonstrate that by actually loading a saved game. Just not the one you selected, because that save doesn't actually exist. instead, it loads an old save from whenever it was last able to write save games to the Documents folder.

Writing this post, I'm reminded of the Half-Life 2 speedrun I watched during SGDQ last month. Apparently, Half-Life 2 protects against save game corruption by have pre-made saves at the beginning of each map with all the items and stuff you should have at that point in the game. So the speedrunner would load a map, quicksave, delete the quicksave, then quickload to get the pre-made save on that map with all the items he had skipped picking up. Which strikes me as a bit cheaty even for a speed-run

Roosevelt wrote:

I wrote:Does Space Teddy Roosevelt wrestle Space Bears and fight the Space Spanish-American War with his band of Space-volunteers the Space Rough Riders?

EdgarJPublius wrote:Which strikes me as a bit cheaty even for a speed-run

There are basically two camps of speedrunners. "Anything Goes", where creative cheats are celebrated. And then "realistic" runs, which try to emulate what a more typical player would do, just much faster.

EdgarJPublius wrote:Which strikes me as a bit cheaty even for a speed-run

There are basically two camps of speedrunners. "Anything Goes", where creative cheats are celebrated. And then "realistic" runs, which try to emulate what a more typical player would do, just much faster.

And of course, a lot of people don't find that fun. Which is why there's a "Glitchless" category of speedruns. Unfortunately, there's a lot of debate into what counts as a glitch...

Old-school speed-running: Quake Done Quick and QDQ with a vengeance were good, and there was a Half-Life speed-run with cute tricks like building a staircase out of sticky movement-detector mines. It's a bit like building one with the glue gun, only really, really dangerous to fall off.

Yea, I don't mind glitchy speedruns, a lot of them are enormous fun to watch. But I think save manipulation like that is a different thing. It feels like it's only a step removed from a 'speed run' where you just load an existing save at the endgame, or like, using chapter-select to only play the final level.

Although, it's apparently necessary to make Boatless work, and Boatless is fantastic.

Roosevelt wrote:

I wrote:Does Space Teddy Roosevelt wrestle Space Bears and fight the Space Spanish-American War with his band of Space-volunteers the Space Rough Riders?

EdgarJPublius wrote:Yea, I don't mind glitchy speedruns, a lot of them are enormous fun to watch. But I think save manipulation like that is a different thing. It feels like it's only a step removed from a 'speed run' where you just load an existing save at the endgame, or like, using chapter-select to only play the final level.

Although, it's apparently necessary to make Boatless work, and Boatless is fantastic.

Yeah, it's not unreasonable to divide speedruns into three categories:

1) "pure" speedruns where you only use designed features of the game (though the distinction between unanticipated interaction and actual glitch can be hard to make without input from the developers) - so constantly rolling/side-hopping across Hyrule in Ocarina is fair game; climbing a wall-seam isn't.2) "glitch" runs where you can use anything that's in the officially released game, but no external software (possibly also restrictions on third-party controllers)3) "tool-assisted" runs where you can hack the game, hack your saves, use trainers and/or mods, third party controllers with programmable macros - anything goes, basically.

Obviously, there's scope for more divisions of that last category - and if you're using save-hacks to help, you really should include the time spent hacking the save in your completion time. Taking total (game-related) time from when you start a new game also neutralises the "start from save at last save-point" trick - though it does raise the question of whether New Game Plus is legitimate - or for Rogue-Lite games, whether you need to start with a fresh copy of the game or is it legitimate to start with unlocks from previous runs...

The answer to these questions, of course is "either - and the different choices give you different types of speedrun".

The Banjo-Kazooie speedrun has a glitch called Furnace Fun Moves, where you can start a new save file with the moves unlocked on another save file.

Banjo-Tooie has a more controversial glitch (they created a new category to exclude it) called Delayed Cutscene Warp, where you can warp to the location of the last cutscene played. Thus, all you have to do is get to the final boss on a different file, which unlocks the corresponding cutscene for viewing in the main menu, and you can directly warp to the boss, saving about 2 hours.

gmalivuk wrote:

King Author wrote:If space (rather, distance) is an illusion, it'd be possible for one meta-me to experience both body's sensory inputs.

Yes. And if wishes were horses, wishing wells would fill up very quickly with drowned horses.

I've been playing the starcraft remaster. It's worth it alone for matchmaking and sub-minute queue times. Back in the day there was a lot of idling looking for games and no guarantee that you're playing against anyone near your skill level. Communities form around that issue. Now you can just hit a button.

I do like the new look, they were restrained in altering it too much and tried their best to match the general artistic theme. It feels different from vanilla though. There is one issue with Archons when they retarget during their attack animation. I love the new goons, not sure about the tanks. Hatchery looks weird with certain colors. Mostly I don't care.

I recently played through and beat Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. I really liked the mechanics of it. If you haven't played it basically you control two brothers: one controls with the left thumbstick and trigger, the other with the right thumbstick and trigger. And you often need to control them simultaneously, either moving or triggering different things. It was a really fun way to play a game and I really want to play more games with similar mechanics.

Magnanimous wrote:People really weren't kidding when they said Fallout: New Vegas crashed a lot. I think I've got it stable now, but there's still some kind of memory leak so I can't play more than two hours at a time.

Great game though.

Are you using the 4GB launcher? If it's still crashing maybe try this or this

On a similar note, I recent-ishly discovered a Skyrim mod called 'Crash Fixes' that, get this, fixes most common crashes, including those caused by mods.I also discovered that some crashes can also effect your saved games in such a way that they will crash when you try to load them from the main menu, but not if you load them from in game, such as after starting a new game or loading an unaffected save. The Crash Fix save fixes the cause of that issue, but if you have saves that are already effected, it can't recover them. So there's a mod that automatically loads a 'safe' save before loading any saved game from the menu, I can't remember where that one is or what it's called though, if anyone needs it I can probably dig it up again. There's also a few save-cleaning tools you can use to fix various causes of save corruption including some, but not all, instances of the above-mentioned save issue.

I have learned so much about creating stable modded Skyrim installs, I probably could have done something more productive with that time.

Also, because it's late/early and I'm rambling, I recently heard a cool story about Legend of the Five Rings that pertains to an earlier conversation about multi-scale war-games.

Apparently, at a convention, there was an organized L5R event where players took on the role of the leaders of the various factions in a Diplomacy style game in a small room at the convention hotel using a map of the L5R world. Meanwhile, In one of the larger convention halls, each faction had a number of 'field commanders' who were actually responsible for resolving moves and combats using matches of L5R against the other field commanders to decide the winner of combats. The faction leaders could not communicate directly with their field commander, but had a runner whose job was to relay orders and communications between the faction leader and their field commanders. The faction leaders had the grand strategic view of what was going on, and could also communicate directly with the other faction leaders to make alliances and other typical Diplomacy-style stuff. However, the field commanders had their own ground-level view of what was going on and could choose to disobey the faction leaders' orders if they it necessary.

Unfortunately, the company that made L5R as a rule didn't really discuss tournament results except by incorporating them into the games lore, so a lot of the actual details of events like this are only available as oral-history from the people who were there.

Still rambling, this reminds of another L5R story I heard a few years back where apparently a group of competitive players who supported a particular faction, discovered an unbalancingly powerful strategy (I don't recall if it was actually a 'combo' using the interaction between specific cards to do something powerful and likely un-intended by the game creators, or if it was just a particularly strong strategy) and conspired amongst themselves to keep the particulars, and even the existence, of this strategy secret. They were able to win a number of tournaments this way before anyone even realized there was something going on, and were able to keep the details of the strategy secret for some amount of time after people realized that there was some powerful secret strategy being used to win tournaments.

Further rambling, there was recently a similar story in Magic the Gathering where tournament and deck information is generally much more available. There was a rumor being spread about a deck that a certain team was developing for an upcoming tournament that was very powerful. Normally, because of how public tournament results and deck information is in Magic, teams will test new decks for major tournaments amongst themselves, not risking other competitive players or teams picking up on what they're doing and potentially countering the new strategy or building their own versions of it. (An interesting aspect of this, many professional competitive players have sponsorships from websites that publish MtG related content, such as decklists and strategy articles. As part of these sponsorship deals, the pro-players generally write some number of articles about game strategies and building powerful decks. It's basically a truism in the MtG community that whenever a Pro writes an article about a particular deck before a major tournament, the one thing you can be sure of is that, despite however much praise they put on the deck and how much they talk about how excited they are to be taking it to the upcoming major tournament, it's not the deck they'll be taking to the tournament. usually, the deck is one that people are already aware of and is generally considered a top competitive deck for the format. What's really interesting is that different tournaments have different meta-games depending on the level of competition (I.E. Open tournament series where anyone can compete, vs. invitational series where only proven skilled players will be playing) and how 'mature' the format is (basically, how long it's been since the latest set release and how many tournaments have been played since then). Depending ont hese meta-game factors, you can sometimes reasonably predict whether the pros writing articles about a deck will be playing a deck that counters the one they wrote about, or a deck that is strong against decks that counter the one they wrote about. anyway...)

This team however was apparently playing the deck in the open in online tournaments and were trying to keep it secret by dropping from the event if it looked like they would place too highly and thus expose the deck to a larger audience, and even conceding games where their opponents played cards that would let them see the whole deck.

These rumors, and the alleged shenanigans of the team trying to protect their super-secret deck, caused a minor scandal int he MtG community, there was rampant speculation about the particulars of the deck, attempts to reconstruct it from reports of players who'd played against it, and even bounties offered for anyone who could provide the complete decklist.

In the end, just before the major tournament the deck was allegedly being tested for, the whole thing was revealed to be a hoax. A few players had come up with a silly deck-name and even built a few different versions of the supposed deck with interesting card interactions that seemed like they could plausibly be part of some very powerful strategy, then they had some their friends start to spread rumors about how the deck was tearing up online tournaments,t hen dropping before the final match to avoid having the full decklist published.

This whole incident also conjures thoughts of past incidents where certain decks, or even particular cards have been hyped up by various means, only for it to be revealed that someone had bought up a large numbers of the cards in questions and was trying to drive demand for them to make a profit reselling them into the hype. I don't think there's ever been a really blatant case of that happening, but lots of suspicious looking incidents.Aside from 'Seance-guy' a mysterious individual who allegedly made a bunch of money from getting into Bitcoin early on, they bought up a bunch of copies of the card Seance which has an interesting and unique but not really particularly powerful effect. Then they started offering bounties in bitcoin for anyone who provided proof that they had destroyed some number of copies of the card with the stated intent of driving up the price for their own stockpile by reducing the supply of the card. Then, more recently, they started offering a significant amount of money to professional competitive players for showing up to major tournaments with a deck featuring Seance.

As far as I've been able to determine, people who destroyed copies of the card did actually receive the proffered amount of bitcoins, but no one ever took a Seance deck to a major tournament and the price of Seance has been basically unaffected by the whole ordeal (currently sitting at ~25 cents, which is pretty much the floor for a rare printed in a modern set that is no longer in standard)

Roosevelt wrote:

I wrote:Does Space Teddy Roosevelt wrestle Space Bears and fight the Space Spanish-American War with his band of Space-volunteers the Space Rough Riders?

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.- Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (14 Jan 1875-1965)

Game of Thrones-style game with princesses. Like a typical princess simulator in some ways: She has to go to school and take care of herself and her family and do Princess Stuff like, um, look pretty and attend royal meetings maybe? And then: You start getting married off against your will. To cruel Knights and Kings that abuse you. So now you have to get out of their castles. Dragon Kicking the bastards in the junk with all your RPG-style spells and abilities at the end. My gaming fleeting thought/idea.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

No idea. The only game I play anymore is World of Warcraft. And as I remember one of the principle characters in one of the expansions was a sex-hungry abusive dragon that wanted to get it on with all the female dragons against their wills! And then I assume force them into servitude/marriage to him. So games are beginning to go where I want them to go.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

I just made one, single, thread about T. Whisperwind being ban hammer from new players. It got -11 in just one day. It is see through now. I made another one about alternate heroines that got up votes... I know up votes and down votes mean nothing in the ends of things... I am just fragile and easily wounded. ANYWAYS. Everywhere I go it seem like they disagree. One poster, OniEyes, even says, 'You too PC strong and independent femme whining about needing Sylvanas cards or whatevs.'

And I just try to explain so much that I not a girl like that. And no one listens and brutally tears apart. every. single... post I make.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

I was amused by the HUGE controversy that arose when people found out about the dummied sex minigame in San Andreas, which became known as the "hot coffee" controversy. But then about a year later, there was a non-dummied sex minigame in God of War that was remarkably similar (all action takes place off screen, you can only hear sounds, it involves some simple button commands) and nobody said anything.

Is anyone else annoyed by the seeming trend in MMOs of eliminating the holy trinity, such that the only obstacle to success is 'more dakka'? I feel like there's a lot of room to share role burden, and maybe making it so everyone can do a little of everything is fine, but a lot of the games that I've been seeing over the last few years seem to have more or less completely done away with all notions of role diversity.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Ginger wrote:My guess: Fantasy Greek or Roman sexy times are okay because they are in fantasy settings with mythology. And a black man on the run from the laws having sexy times? More close to home and not okay.

My guess: first time it happens, media outrage! Parents concerned! Splashy headlines! Second time around, without the shock value that a game that has players take on the role of a professional thug and rewards them for massacring bystanders, killing cops, and generally being a violent criminal also has a minigame for having consensual sex in the context of a relationship. Without that shock value, and without any on-screen action, what's the story? "Parents fail to read back of game case"?

Or, more simply: first time around, it's sensationalist news and gets major media traction (despite the technical details); second time around, with it being an open part of gameplay, and significantly less explicit, it's old news, so the media doesn't run with it the same way, and it doesn't enter the public consciousness.

Also, the front-page journalists who ran with the Hot Coffee story will have had an education in how videogames work during the life of that story, and be less inclined to make themselves look foolish by overreacting to a subsequent incident.